2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Integrative engagement with the humanities enriches an engineering education in instrumental ways, by instructing transdisciplinary competencies that improve a student’s problem-solving readiness, and in ways that facilitate deeper shifts in mindset, including greater reflexivity, improved awareness of the social context for engineered solutions, capacity to grapple with ethical complexity and the ability to understand and harness multiple epistemologies. But while we can develop educational experiences that facilitate this integration, engaging the community of engineering students that we wish to empower can be a challenge. As Pawley argues, “…boundary work is bigger than simply differentiating one academic discipline or organizational arm from another: the metaphor of a boundary prompts consideration of the ideas of inclusion and exclusion, as well as how various material and immaterial groups are differentiated.”[1]

This case study reports on a science communication elective at [name redacted] that successfully employs pedagogies from theatre and performance studies to help engineering students develop their communication skills, as well as their ability to understand multiple perspectives and to think critically about complex socially contextualized problems. The elective serves as a model for socio-technical integration: students within this classroom are familiar with the material conditions of their environment—an engineering classroom, a community of fellow engineering students, an instructor who is familiar with the discipline—but are engaging with unfamiliar epistemologies and pedagogies; in this way the course helps students and instructors to bridge the socio-technical divide.

Performance functions as a critical paradigm in this course [2]. It provides a lens for critical analysis, as student investigate what is occurring when scientific information – their dominion of expertise – is being communicated to or performed for the public. It is also deployed in situated learning, as students take on and perform different roles in the science communication process. It is one such activity that we describe in this paper, and which provides students with the space to straddle the boundary between science and the arts.

Students are led through an exercise in which they adopt the role of science journalist to communicate the significance of findings as shared/received by a scientific "expert.” They are given texts that journalists typically have access to when composing news articles, including a research paper, press releases, and relevant backgrounders. They are also given the opportunity to interview a “scientist affiliated with the lab” that made the breakthrough. It is in this interview that students try-on the professional personae of science journalist while using the interview to gather more information, taking advantage of roleplay as a mechanism to better understand the norms and characteristics of what is typically seen as a “social” rather than “technical” skill. This paper will review and analyze interactions that take place within this activity and students’ reports of their own learning, to explore how performance pedagogies deployed within engineering contexts can work to expose tensions between the social and technical, and prepare students to analyze, create and engage as socio-technical thinkers.

[1] A. Pawley, "Engineering faculty drawing the line: a taxonomy of boundary work in academic engineering," Engineering Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 145-169, August 2012.
[2] K. Gallagher and B. Freeman, "Introduction: Taking a Step Back," in In Defence of Theatre, Toronto, University of Toronto Press , 2016, pp. 3-20.